Leave the Last Page

by Stephen Barnard

  Grandma Patty wasn’t particularly trying to get in, or even get anyone’s attention. It was like she was playing charades. Bizzarely, hovering in the space on the other side of the window, she was acting out in mime all the adventures they had had in their quest to regain Greatgrammy Aisling’s necklace. There was the breaking of the statue for the key, the defeat of the giant tramps, the altercation in the old shop…through it all Grandma Patty spun and twirled, wielding her walking stick like a weapon and defeating all manner of invisible enemies.

  It made Tom laugh in his bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked his Dad. ‘Don’t exert yourself! I want you to sleep!’

  Tom just laughed louder as his Grandma was miming hand-to-hand combat, no doubt with Mrs Aziram.

  ‘Enough!’ said the dad-figure – because Tom knew now that it wasn’t really his dad – ‘You must rest! Eternal rest!’

  Then Grandma Patty broke out her mime and slammed her walking stick against the glass. It didn’t smash, but that wasn’t her intention: she was showing him something. Another one of her stickers.

  This one was designed to look like a street sign – he could see that much – but he couldn’t make out the words. I have to get out of bed, he thought. He heaved with everything he had, causing the bed to shake with the effort.

  ‘No!’ said Kildark (because Dad was gone now, and the real enemy was in his place). ‘You can’t!’

  But Tom could. He tore himself free of the cotton wool and flung himself at the glass. He braced himself against it with his hands, and looked directly at the sticker that his flying grandma was showing him.

  Tom woke up.

  *

  Patty gasped with relief as her grandson’s eyes flickered open. She continued to mop his brow but gave him a squeeze with her other arm. ‘Hello, you!’

  Even the head teacher visibly slumped in her chair-prison as the tension immediately left the room. At the same time, Ben walked back into the hall.

  ‘He’s awake!’ Patty called out. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ she asked Tom.

  Tom coughed as he sat up, but said, ‘I’m fine.’ He put his fingers to his temple. ‘This hurts a little.’

  ‘Yes, well she gave you quite a whack.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tom!’ blurted out Mrs Aziram. ‘I don’t know what happened!’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Tom. ‘But that makes us even.’

  ‘Hmmph!’ said Grandma Patty. ‘I’m not sure I agree with that!’ She got up and turned the headteacher’s chair around so that she was facing the wall. ‘Button it, you!’

  ‘It’s all clear outside,’ said Ben. ‘His car’s gone. He’s put a brick through my windscreen before leaving though.’

  ‘Mardy,’ muttered Patty.

  Ben nodded. ‘I tried to ring my son because I had a signal for a second, but I couldn’t get through.’

  Patty wished she had a mobile now to try and contact Alex and Charlotte. She knew the house phone number though, so she could try the school landline. She explained her thoughts to the others.

  ‘Press nine for an outside line!’ added Mrs Aziram helpfully.

  Patty went down the corridor and headed straight for the front of the school. She picked up the phone at the reception desk. Once she’d dialled she listened to the tone. It was picked up on the third ring. It was Alex who answered. ‘Hello? Who’s this?’

  ‘Hello, dearie! I just wanted to let you know that Tom’s okay. He’s had-’

  ‘Hello? Hello? Is there somebody there?’

  ‘Alex, can’t you hear me? It’s your mother!’

  ‘Hello? Look, just get off this line will you! Hello!’

  It was clear that Alex wasn’t going to be able to hear her, that the lines of communication weren’t truly open.

  But then Patty had an idea. How had they communicated before this?

  Tom’s notebook was still in her handbag from when she was reading it for clues earlier. She opened it at those pages. ‘George stopped and gasped as the spider disappeared over the horizon.’

  ‘Mum? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, son! We’re fine!’

  ‘Hello? I’ve lost you again, Mum!’

  Patty realised that it was only the story that could get through. They’d left torn pages of it earlier; now she could read it to him and communicate that way. ‘Oh it’s no use, that thing is too fast!’

  ‘That’s great, Mum! Keep going!’

  She did, and when the others joined her to see what was taking her so long, she handed the phone over to Tom and let him read it. ‘There was a little gasp from behind him. He took a look at the rest of the hall. There were rows and rows of wooden chairs, some of them occupied by surprised looking people.’

  Ben whispered to Patty. ‘Do you think they’ll work out that we’re at the school?’

  ‘They just might.’

  Tom looked down at the notebook. The chapter was finished, and although there was still more of the story to go, the pages weren’t revealing to them what came next. ‘It doesn’t want them to know any more,’ he said. ‘I love you!’ he shouted down the phone, but it was obvious that they could no longer hear. He hung up.

  Ben looked at the notebook. It doesn’t seem to want us to know what’s next either. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘I know,’ said Tom.

  ‘You remember what you wrote next in the story?’ asked Grandma Patty.

  ‘No, but I know where we’re going. You showed me in my dream. It was on your walking stick. A particular street.’

  Patty looked down and twirled the wood, pausing to look at stickers. ‘Highway to Hell?’

  ‘No, but I guess it might as well be. It’s not on your stick now. Let’s get in the car and I’ll show you; it’s not far.’

  He looked up at both Patty and Ben. ‘This is nearly over.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHEN THE LINE WENT DEAD, ALEX PUNCHED IN THE NUMBER THAT ALLOWED YOU TO TRACE THE CALL. He read it out to Charlotte, who jotted it down.

  ‘That number’s familiar,’ she said, and pulled her mobile out of her pocket. She scrolled through the contents until she found what she was after. ‘It’s Tom’s old school. They rang us from Bolton Road Primary.’

  ‘Then that’s where we’re heading,’ said Alex, reaching for his car keys.

  *

  Daniel Fields had been pacing around the house, keen to get moving. With all the technology around him out of whack he felt a little bit lost, and wasn’t happy with the notion of having to rely on others. Still, what was he going to do? Just go out on his bike and ride around town, hoping to bump into dad?

  No, he had a little more to go on than that. From his father’s notes he had gleaned that the story was the key to communication, and although those in pursuit always seemed one step behind the central players of this game, they could rely on the story pages to keep them updated.

  And then Dad, in the story now (he believed that completely), was trying to communicate with him. Only, without a notebook of narrative to fall back on, it was the story of their relationship that was coming through. It was the words only they shared that had found the right frequency and broken through the technological crash. Dan the Man. Danny-Boy.

  Five minutes ago, his phone had sounded with the tone that indicated a text, but there had been nothing there. However, whenever he tried to navigate around the functions and applications on his phone, it would always take him back to the Maps facility. There was a map open of the town, but a part of town he never really ventured into. There was a pin in the map. When he tried to click it for more information, nothing happened, but he could neither move or delete the pin. And when he tried to do something else with the phone, it always came back to the same map function.

  Around the pin wasn’t much help either. There were street names nearby, and a primary school not far to the south of the pin, but where it was positioned was right in the middle of a huge, blank area, with no street names or landmarks, just a voi
d. He supposed it could be fields or a park, but they were usually labelled, and tended to be unlikely in the middle of such a built up area. Also, the blank space was uniformly circular, surely impossible when it came to town planning. Streets just stopped dead when they got to the circumference of the empty circle. It looked like a big chunk of that part of town had been wiped, and replaced with…nothing.

  But there was a pin in the middle of it, and Dan thought that was where his dad was, or at least where he was heading. Me too, he thought.

  The doorbell rang, and Dan slid across the hall to answer it. His grandad was on the doorstep. Jimmy Fields was a short but stocky man. His hair was slicked back and slate grey, and his weathered face pulled up on one side in a squint like he was permanently grimacing in pain from a toothache. ‘Hello, Daniel. You ready to go and get your father out of whatever trouble he’s found himself in?’

  Dan looked past his grandad and into the street. ‘We’re going in that?’

  *

  ‘Watch out for broken glass,’ said Ben. ‘Just brush it onto the floor.’ Patty had taken the back seat, but Tom sat up front, to help navigate Ben to wherever they were going.

  ‘Where to?’ Ben asked. In Tom’s story the characters had found the path to their nemesis just behind the theatre.

  ‘It’s not far from here,’ said Tom. ‘Just back on the main street and about a minute’s drive. It’s a place called No Through Road.’

  Ben smirked. ‘That’s not a real street name, Tom.’

  ‘It is. I saw it in my dream, and I know where it is. I’ve passed it before in the car.’

  ‘No, what that means is, when a street doesn’t lead anywhere, only to the houses that are on that address, and you can’t drive through to anywhere else, they put up a sign saying No Through Road.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Kildark’s lair is on No Through Road.’

  ‘But the street will be called something else.’

  Tom wasn’t for backing down. ‘Well, today it’s definitely called No Through Road.’

  Patty spoke up from the back. ‘Ben, you’re forgetting that none of this needs to make true sense for it to actually be. You’ve seen that first hand. Tom’s mind created this topsy-turvy world that we’re currently in, and if he says his dream told him that’s the way to go, I think we believe it.’

  Tom spoke. ‘And I know what a sign like that normally means, Ben. It means Dead End. I think that’s the point: we’re near to the end, dead or otherwise.’

  Ben sighed, but it was followed by a grin. He admired the fight in this boy. It was easy to forget that he was only eleven. ‘Okay. No Through Road. Point the way, Tom.’

  Tom had been right in that it was barely a minute’s drive away. Ben had pulled back onto the main street and then three blocks later he was turning left, back into a residential area. He pulled up by a side street, at Tom’s request. ‘There it is.’

  The actual address was Mort Lane, which supported Tom’s idea about death or endings. Above the sign was another that did read, as promised, No Through Road.

  ‘I think we walk from here,’ said Tom, getting out. The others followed, Patty heaving a little as she lugged her handbag and steadied herself with her stick.

  I mustn’t forget that she’s older, thought Ben. I’m the policeman. I have to take the threat on, not these two. Then he thought about his father, and his own son: like these two, a generation either side of him. He never thought of his dad as old, and he was probably the same age as Patty. He always thought that Dan – once you chipped away at him – was pretty resourceful, much like Tom. He made a mental note to do better by both of them, once he got out of this crazy situation.

  ‘Shall we?’ said Patty.

  They walked down Mort Lane, which was quite a tight street made up of stone terraced cottages with very small front gardens. Cars were parked wherever they could fit, which meant that there was only room on the road for one vehicle to drive along at a time. It was quiet now. Because the parked cars straddled the pavement too, there was hardly room to walk there so the three of them took the road and walked right down the middle of it, like gunslingers.

  They could see the end, and they could see that what was there wasn’t typical of Mort Lane on any other day.

  They got the impression that there probably used to be a detached cottage at the end of the lane, by the quaint stone wall with the wrought iron gate, the metal washing line posts, and the start of a crazy paving path. But beyond the first couple of feet of it, and the overgrown lawn beside it, normality had been ripped away. There was a large, gaping hole where the cottage once stood, and in its place, a gritty, dusty road that led off into the foreseeable distance. The land either side of the road looked barren and dead.

  ‘I hope the homeowners were at work when their cottage disappeared,’ said Ben.

  ‘And I hope we get it back for them before they come home,’ added Patty.

  Tom glanced around at the other houses. No twitching curtains, no signs of life. ‘I think it’s just us until this thing is over.’ He took out his notebook. ‘The next bit of the story is in here.’ He skimmed over the pages. ‘I remember it now. It ends okay for everyone!’

  He handed it to Patty. ‘I’m sure it does, dearie, because you’re a sweet-natured boy who wouldn’t write a terrible ending for anyone.’ She looked down at one of the pages and smiled. ‘But I don’t think we need to read it any more. We’ve seen enough to know that this can take a different turn very quickly.’

  Ben agreed. ‘We make our own future,’ he said. ‘I think it’s better we don’t get swayed by false hope. Remember, nobody got stabbed in your version of the story.’

  ‘You got healed though,’ said Tom. ‘With bum cream.’

  Tom and Patty chuckled. ‘You knew!’ said Grandma.

  ‘I read the tube.’

  ‘I put it on my elbow!’ exclaimed Grandma. ‘I wonder if it knew the difference?’

  Ben interrupted, referring back to the pages. ‘I just don’t think we need to know what happens. This morning I thought that would help, but now I’m not too sure. How about you just leave the book here? We don’t need distractions.’

  Tom considered this. He tore out all the pages, all but one. ‘I’ll leave the last page in there, just in case.’ He tucked the virtually empty cover inside his jacket.

  They opened the gate with a squeal, and stepped from the long green lawn to the drab dirt of the new road. Tom knelt and weighed down the loose leaves of his story with a rock. ‘For Dad. I know he’ll come.’

  Patty gave him a hug once he stood. They took the next few steps together. There were a couple of signs up ahead. One read: No Through Road. The other, in the exact same font as the sticker, said ‘Highway To Hell’.

  ‘He’s toying with us,’ said Patty, jabbing her stick into the ground with frustration.

  ‘Then let’s go find him,’ said Tom.

  They headed off, leaving the signposts behind them.

  *

  Kildark knew that they were coming; he could sense it. He’d also picked up a lot about what was going on; the picture became clearer the closer it got to completion. He knew that he was brought here by the boy’s story, and he knew – like in anything constructed from the mind of children – it was expected that the bad guy would lose.

  But then he also felt that it didn’t have to be that way, that he could do something about it and change this particular destiny.

  He watched the land around him turn sour and poisonous. The dirt bubbled with sticky tar and the grass and fauna seeped pus and sweated with decay. He was most impressed when the black car that he had driven down this long and desolate road, once he left it, shuddered with life and sprouted eight hairy ebony legs; he cackled with glee when the headlights multiplied into numerous green, unblinking eyes; he laughed heartily when the exhaust shot out webs rather than fumes. He liked this world that was terraforming around him.

  And he knew that if he could beat the boy and dest
roy his book…destroy him, then he would get to keep this patch of dark world, and rule from it, until it all around it turned into a black realm of sorrow and anguish.

  Two of my favourite words, he thought.

  Hurry along, little boy.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE WORLD AROUND THEM HAD BECOME COMPLETELY UNRECOGNISABLE.

  The land was sick with a purple weed that seemed to drip a mucus-like sap. Where grass did break through it was oily and slick. The dirt road beneath their feet was largely dry and dusty like powdered bone, but occasionally they’d stand on a spot that bubbled with heat and the threat of what smelled like sulphur.

  In the distance they could see rickety houses on stilts, as quiet and deathly as those on Mort Lane. ‘Welcome to Greensphere,’ said Tom bitterly.

  ‘It isn’t particularly green, dearie,’ replied Grandma Patty.

  Ben turned around and walked backwards a few steps, and pointed from where they’d come. ‘Look.’

  There was no sign of the row of terraced cottages even though they hadn’t walked so far that they should be out of view; they were completely surrounded by a new and treacherous world. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this,’ said Ben. ‘But if we don’t win this thing, I think this is what the world is like from here on in.’

  Tom hung his head. ‘This is all my fault.’

  Patty shook his shoulder. ‘No it isn’t. If this goes belly up it is my fault. I believed in the old tales my mother used to tell me about the power in a last breath, and lord if she didn’t make that come true. None of us could predict that the combination of her desire to get everything out of her last moment, and your fertile and vivid imagination, would lead to such an adventure as this, but I made it happen, so if it all goes wrong, it’s my fault.’